Disappearing Berlin is a performance and music program initiated by the Schinkel Pavillon that approaches the production of space as a multilayered practice unfolding simultaneously on artistic, architectural, social, and cultural levels. The triad of performance, space, and audience forms the dynamic interplay and structural framework of each artistic intervention. Rather than treating space as a neutral backdrop, the program understands the city as an active agent, continually shaped through embodied presence and collective perception.

In dialogue with Berlin’s own history of rupture and reinvention, Disappearing Berlin stages temporary, site-specific performances in buildings and urban spaces facing demolition, privatization, or change—spaces that have lost or are about to lose their former function. These sites, suspended between past and future, become containers for a collective reflection on how we confront the transformation of our cities today. Through large-scale performances, choreographic works, concerts, talks, and sound installations, Berlin emerges as both protagonist and palimpsest: a layered urban text in which memory politics, economic pressures, and cultural imaginaries inscribe themselves anew. Each intervention becomes a temporary occupation of space—a choreographic act that reveals the visible and invisible structures shaping urban life.

At its core, Disappearing Berlin creates space and time for artists to develop new work beyond institutional frameworks and conventional production conditions. By opening access to transitional and often inaccessible sites, the program enables artistic research and experimentation in direct response to specific urban contexts. Flexible formats and lightweight production methods allow for mobile, spontaneous interventions that unfold in close dialogue with their surroundings. Artists are invited to test ideas, expand their practice, and engage audiences in shared, time-based experiences that emphasize presence, risk, and immediacy—proposing artistic practice itself as a way of sensing, questioning, and reimagining the choreographies of the city.